Sunday, 25 September 2011

Hysteria Project - Horror Videogame Review (PS3 Mini)

Hysteria is a fully FMV (full motion video) experience, I picked it up as it was cheap on the PSN store.  It sounded kind of interesting.

In Hysteria you are a man who awakes tied up with duct tape in a shed.  Managing to escape your bonds you leave the shed to discover you are in the middle of a wood.  While running away you become pursued by a strange hooded man wielding an axe.  The woods are maze like, and there are explosive trip wires set up.  You keep getting strange flashbacks as well as hallucinating a H symbol that appears everywhere.

The game is different, being as it is one long video clip where you occasionally get to make decisions such as what route to take, or if to hide or run.  In these situations there is usually only a right or wrong choice, it being game over if you choose wrong.  Sometimes button prompts will turn up on screen, you must complete these button presses in time or you will be killed (such as stealthily moving through the wood, or trying to get an explosive device out of a pile of leaves).

The game is only about 15 minutes in total, much of this devoted to you character running along small woodland paths.  It never really feels like you have much impact on events, but the first person perspective is kinda neat.  The hooded figure chasing you is able to warp around, but is quite useless at catching you as even if he is right behind you, you have time to hide behind a log or tree without him noticing.

The game ends with you arriving at an urban environment and then promptly fades to black saying 'to be continued'.  It is something different and despite the low budget did get my flesh crawling sometimes when the mad hooded man appears.

If you are after something different then try this out, but be warned it is very short, and there is zero replay value.


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